My paper takes on the theme of this 3rd Nakem Conference, “Continuity: Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in the Imagined Amianan Nation in the Homeland and in Exile.” In particular, it offers as problematiques various concepts that, I hope, will help shed light on the issue of advocacy Nakem is advancing, and this issue is anchored on the need to resist and insist on the necessity for a just and fair society for all peoples of the Philippines, a just and fair society that includes as its cornerstone, the indispensable need to pursue the ends of linguistic justice and cultural democracy. I will argue that the shaping and reshaping—and thus, the forming and re-forming—of an Amianan Nation made up of the many nations of this geographic part of this homeland is the only way to pursue the ends of linguistic and cultural justice and, thus, the ends of cultural pluralism as a democratic way of life for all our peoples. Our position at Nakem, this movement that we have put together and which now solidifies our view of ourselves and which provides a counter-hegemonic discourse to the hegemony that is making us forget who we are, is clear: that Nakem is our contingency—our very own ‘politics of contingency’ (Ahmad 1996) —our very own counter-hegemonic strategy to resist the erasure of our languages and cultures, and our insistence of our right to exist as people mediated by our languages and cultures.

There are two takes that I want to be clear about: resistance and insistence (Agcaoili 2007). Both takes are intricately linked, one needing each other, one never standing apart from each other. Resistance, in my view, gives a symptomatic account of what is happening in Philippine society, whether this concept of ‘Philippine society’ is viewed from the homeland or is viewed in exile and diaspora. The symptomatic account gives us as well the creative rage, the same critical energy we need to battle for every inch of cultural and linguistic space we need to affirm our existence as real nations in this Nation and State we call, accidentally, by historical force, the Philippines. For even the name of this country is imposed upon us by a history we only have had so much the opposite of ‘voluntas’, that, with an innate gravitas, we took in stride. But today, this gravitas has to be summoned again, back to where it should belong in the effort to call out our names that have been hijacked by the contemporary conspirators against all the lesser of us, the lesser because we are not at the center of power, because we are not at the vortex of Manila empire, because we are not at the center of this Tagalogistic hegemony being imposed upon us, with the collusion of our economic, political, and cultural leaders.

The second take, insistence, gives us the knowledge to figure out and map out the path to redeeming ourselves from the onslaught of everything opposite what is just and fair and democratic in all three structures of our society—the political, economic, and cultural—structures that have all been used against us without us realizing it, and which, because we have lacked the courage and the critique, we somehow took part in being used against us by our very own blessing and permission.

For we permitted in our classrooms the banning of our native languages in the name of two hopes: (a) the hope that our school children would speak the colonizers’ English so they would have an advantage in seeking power and financial gain via employment in the institutions of the nation that are being used to guarantee that such unjust linguistic and cultural arrangements would continue, and (b) the hope that our children would speak the language of the nation herein framed, constitutionally, by ignorant advocates of the national language as Filipino but in reality is just a legal maneuver to deter our resistance to unmask what is in this name we call Filipino. Our combined effort to unmask, of course, leads us to the lies of the 1934-1935 Constitution, so that when we look into the proceedings of that Constitution, we uncover here the ghosts of the past, the ghosts lurking from behind and looming large before us, the ghosts reminding us that we have been robbed of our human right to speak our own languages and that we have the basic and fundamental right to allow our productive traditions to not only live and thrive and continue to shape and form the world view of our future. We speak here, of course, of the ‘panagkakannayon’ of our histories, our stories, our senses of selves, our senses of being, our senses of becoming, our dream of a world of not one speech but many speeches, of a world not massified by the inane ‘Wowowee’ and the equally inane ‘Eat Bulaga’ that have become our cultural fare for anything we can call ethnic pride and the systematic rendering into a national spectacle of our misery, sadness, and incapacity to get out of our collective Calvary.

One reason for all these is that we permit them to happen, and in the constancy of that permission, we have learned to like ‘the way things are’, we have began to forgive the perpetrators and have, in fact, learned to love them and welcome them in our midst.

The final proof of this is the educational system—that bastion, supposedly, of our critical gifts and our only institution that can offer us hope to look at things always with new eyes, with a renewed view of the world each day, with the insight to make us commit ourselves to the future whose beginnings are not separate from what we are pursuing at present.

The educational system of this country has colluded with all our other institutions to make us be ashamed of ourselves when (a) we cannot speak and write and read and listen in English enough, and (b) when we cannot speak Filipino as the national language enough.

The educational system –our main cultural institution—has served as the conduit of this shame, making us look at ourselves with unkindness and embarrassment and inferiority courtesy of the little emperor and the little colonizer that we have allowed to reside in our soul and mind.

For indeed, the empire is back, and is back hitting us, and he speaks English with his capital and military might and economic superpower and all the injustices that can go with what it had got against us to make us kowtow to its wishes.

For indeed, too, the colonizer is back, with his view of the world as triumphant as the emperor in him, with his willing ally the neocolonizer, he who speaks the language of the Tagalog nation, and since we have found out that this Tagalog nation is just like us that dreamt of freedom and democracy from the emperor and the colonizer, this Tagalog nation had to extend to all the ‘nations’ of the Philippines and has to be imposed as exemplar par excellence by the politicos who want our votes and who want as well their pork barrel, hence, the equation, mystical as it is mysteriously mistaken and is part of the history of political malpractice: Tagalog=P/Filipino.

The politics of the official curriculum (Shor & Freire 1987) from 1935 onwards, when Tagalog, in principle, was given the army and the navy by a Tagalog President, Manuel Luis Quezon, must be indicted as the genesis of all our woes, as that curriculum did not give us a chance at all to prove to the nation, much less to the world, that each of our languages and cultures have the right to exist side by side with us as part of our basic human rights. In that curriculum since 1935 and until today, no Yogad can ever have a full claim to his own very language and culture though he first learned to look at the world in kindness and relationship and truth. To speak, thus, of a Yogad curriculum or an Ibanag curriculum, much less of an Ivatan curriculum, is an impossible speech for the curriculum makers; it is simply not within their view, not within their sight, and with the emperor’s and neocolonizer’s qualifications on their sleeves and resumes, the curriculum makers cannot see the world using our eyes: they do not have the eyes that are our eyes because they did not recognize our ontic worth (Who are we, by the way, from the Othered nations of this Republic?), and since they did not recognize us (Why would our existence be necessary when only one existence, that of the Center, is sufficient to declare ourselves a Republic?).

The logic of our past is convoluted.

We permitted this logic to happen and to rule over us for almost eighty years since the Quezon-Recto collusion of the root cause of all the linguistic and cultural evils of this country—a single phrase, not even a sentence, but that phrase, is as well our death sentence, us people of the Amianan, us people of all other communities in the Philippines that did not belong to the axis of politics, economics, and culture.

We are to be blamed, partially, as part of a deal to be a signatory of the social contract, that sui generis, is flawed as the veil of ignorance is not ignorant but arranged to give privilege, benefit, and entitlement to one language and one culture—the Culture of the Center of Power and Commerce and Economics, and all the others are simply exhibits in the museum of our nation’s colonized lives. Indeed, there were benefits, because a Visayan can become a maid in Manila if she were to speak acceptable Tagalog in much the same way that a classroom teacher in the country can be a good nanny in Singapore if she spoke acceptable English.

There is a double whammy in all these, and the Othered languages and cultures of the homeland can never win: they got no army, they got no navy, and no legislator, so far, has given these Othered language and cultures the benefit of the doubt except for some consuelo de bobo from the ranks of the more enlightened ones who can only rattle off the virtues of federalism as the structuring principles to save us from ourselves—from this continuing ‘Tagalogishization’ and ‘Englishization’ of our minds.

Even from among our ranks, there is a certain ‘darkness’ we have in our heads.

Some of our advocates of alternative education and cultural cross-cultural sensitivity and competence, for instance, cannot yet see clearly the necessity to offer an alternative to our view of the world in our homeland by revisiting our living traditions. Some even have the temerity of invoking the ‘nation’ and ‘national language’ against us as if we are not part of the nation—as if we have successfully seceded from the larger community, and as if our languages do not have any place in the formation of that canon we call simply, for want of any better term, ‘national language’.

We question, of course, what this national language is all about, and lacking in anything new, we declare: the national language being rammed into our throats is simply Tagalog renamed, for political neutrality, a wise move from the operators of our miseducation. You cannot make a language by giving it another name. For one, we are doing injustice to the Tagalogs by a systematic hoodwinking of them as their language now is no longer Tagalog but Filipino, with an ‘F’ from a former name with a ‘P’. The Ilokanos of Hawai`i would call this ‘wais’.

Now, let us unmask what has happened, with our collusion and connivance: a language was renamed, and gave our blessing, and lost our head, and we want this fact of losing our head to be handed down to our children and to be perpetrated forever. We lose our head, we lose our language, and we lose our own sense of self, our sense of the world, and our sense of community. The only reason why we do not know our Amianan selves is that we do not know enough of our Amianan languages and cultures.

This is plain enough—and simple to understand.

But it is difficult for the Ilokano, for instance, to be told that he is not Ilokano enough to be able to understand with self-reflexivity, his Ilokanoness. For Ilokanoness—as in being Itawis or Dupaningan Agta—is not simply speaking one’s own language everyday and using it as if it were a tool to be discarded. The truth of the matter is that we are our own language and all the thinking that go with it, all the self-reflections, the contemplation, the solitude, and the culture-making that attend to our respective languages. Being able to ‘use’ our native language in a survival mode does not give us the full birthright to that language even if, indeed, we are born into it.

Ownership of a language and the culture that it mediates demands much more.

It demands our recognition that our language affirms our ontological existence—that we are Kiangan because we speak the Kiangan language, that we are Yapayao because we speak the Yapayao language, that we are Ilongot because we speak the Ilongot language.

This ontological constitution can be extended to account our Amianan selves: we are people/s of the Amianan because we speak any of those 48 Amianan languages. It is just accidental that by force of the energy and dynamism of history, Ilokano has become the lingua franca in these parts. But let it not be said that Ilokano becomes the colonizing language; let it be said of the reverse: that the resistance and insistence of the Ilokano language to affirm its own existence is one example any of the Amianan languages can revisit—and perhaps follow—to resist this rampart neocolonization of the Center of Power, Commerce and Culture that is happening before our very eyes. Let is be said as well, that through Ilokano as the language franca of the Amianan, the other 47 languages will find their way back to the mainstream of our Amianan lives, as was shown in the work of Robinson on the Dupaningan Agta (2008).

And we allowed this to happen, and we continue to do so, not from a victim’s point of view, but from a resister’s: we resist this incursion of our sense of self by the Other self that has rendered us the Othered self of this homeland. The project to other us peoples of the Amianan, we now know, is the same project that has made us—all other peoples of this country—second class citizens of the Republic.

The Project to ‘Other’ Us

Let it be said that the concept of ‘nation’ that framed the search for a ‘national language’ prior to and during the 1934-1935 Constitutional Assembly—with the Assembly a political act during the Commonwealth Period, a regime under the watch of the United States, that, more than 30 years before, declared to colonize the Philippine Islands at the cost of 20M dollars that they paid to then colonizer, the Spaniards—is a 19th century fossil which Quezon himself has held onto fiercely, saying, that he imagined a nation like Germany, England, France, and Spain, that spoke, singly, in a ‘national language,’ with German for Germany, French for France, Spanish for Spain, and English for England (Agcaoili 2007).

The temptations of a national language for the Filipinos came from that view, and which, judging from the outcome of the proceedings of the 1935 Constitution, paved the way to what is now called, in juridical terms, ‘Filipino’ for the Filipinos, as per the proviso of the 1987 Constitution, that was in tandem with President Corazon Aquino’s idea for anything nationalist during the euphoria after EDSA People Power. This neat and nifty way of resolving the multilingual and multicultural condition of the Philippines is a remnant of that view, and which to this day, continues to be the view of even the most ‘educated’ among our lot, with ‘national artists’ in support of Tagalogism supporting that view, under the guise of a monolingual nation speaking together in monolingual tone and temper and making everyone virtually a lobotomized citizen, each mind going through a brain surgery in the name of a nation that is monolingual in its conception of itself. Such is the lot of our people—such is our lot still, making each one of us Manilenio and no less, in speech as well as in thought, with that brainwashing slogan to boot that is meant to erase the multilingualism and multiculturalism that we are: ‘isang bansa, isang diwa’ (one country, one thought), with ‘diwa’ here an essentialist reduction of all our languages into one language we call ‘Pilipino’ during the Marcos regime, and ‘Filipino’ during the Aquino regime. The movement thus from Tagalog to Pilipino to Filipino is the same movement based on a ruse and a trick—and the trick has as its tacit aim of making us speak the same language, that, in reality, does not speak the many of us but only the few, if speech here is understood to mean a truly intellectualized one, minus the shallow discourses of politicians and their allies who believed that to speak in one language at the expense of the other languages is the key to nationalism and national life, thereby effectively excluding the many of us—Othering us, with us becoming the Other if only to account who we are in the project to nationalize everything from animal (the carabao) to language (Tagalog, then Pilipino, then Filipino).

We remember, of course, of the ruse that justified the American aggression that ended in the American colonial project taking its hold on the peoples of the Philippines, with the public schools ascertaining that every child spoke a version of English depending on the language of the place, and the private schools, the bedrock of everything that spells ‘elite’ becoming an appendage to the longer view of transforming every Filipino a virtual brown American. The ruse is couched in less colonial terms and more in terms of a ‘big brother’s act’ of exercising his newfound imperial and colonial kindness fresh from its history of struggle and, eventually, independence from the British. It is this same parallel narrative that we take as the starting point for all that we would like to tell—in speech as in practice: imperial Manila cannot continue to be our ‘big brother’ forever if we are not going to allow it because allowing it to happen reduces us into a pandering pawn for anything and everything Manila and this neocolonialist attitude grounded on the discourse of the neo-colonizer that is further grounded on a misreading of our multicultural condition as a country. It is high time we wrote our own ‘modes of refusal’ to inaugurate our very own ‘rational protest’ (Barry 1996) against those forces that deny us our own existence in our own languages and cultures. For there is no existence that is meaningful and relevant for our own ethno-cultural and ethno-linguistic communities except that which is mediated by our languages and, therefore, our cultures.

Language and Culture as Fundamental Human Rights

UNESCO declared 2008 as the International Year of Languages. It did so for a reason: the numbers are alarming and we cannot continue to be triumphal and say that it is only the national languages and the international languages that matter. Of the almost 7,000 languages in existence today, more than 3000, about half, is about to die in 200 years if nothing is done to make them thrive and survive. In the Philippines, linguistic data tells you of 175 languages, one of the most diverse in the world. But of these, 4 have gone extinct, and there are many candidates. As soon as the last speaker is gone, the language dies with him. The Darwinist among us—those who declare to all and sundry that the mighty and the powerful is the only one that deserves life—might not see the consequences to mankind of the death of languages. But the truth is this: that languages carry with them the system of knowledge that the speaking community have evolved through centuries of life practice—knowledge systems that we all could put to use in order to enrich our lives.

The hyper-valuation given ‘international’ and ‘national’ languages at the expense of the other because ‘Othered’ languages that do not fall under these categories has resulted in rampant human rights violation. As we have shown: that the only way for our ontological existence to be affirmed is to allow our languages and cultures to mediate such affirmation. The key here is mediation—this power and surprise that every language offers in its act of ‘standing in between’ or ‘betweening’ between our world and us. The maintenance and the sustenance of that ‘betweening’ relationship is what matters in the question of our ontology: our ‘peopleness’—our being and becoming people—is marked in a dynamic way, in the dialectic of speech and reflection, of saying and critique, in contemplation and practice, by our own languages. Our knowing of the world is only made possible by the vast possibilities of our own languages. An imposed language may be indigenized; a legislated one such as Tagalog with the powerful philosophical bent in it that denies us who we are, may be indigenized. But there is a marked difference between ownership and indigenization. At the end of the day, we must begin to see one fact: that language and culture are part and parcel of the notion and the reality of human rights. Deny people their right to their language, you deny them their human rights.

This brings us to our educational and cultural practices, in schools and in the popular forms of the dominant culture such us television, magazines, radio, and film. At our schools, we have offered the school system to act as a conduit of this rampant violation of the basic human rights of people to their languages; we did not intend the human rights violation that we keep on committing, or at least many of us do not wish to commit this violation which has become systemic. The signs are everywhere: the English zones markers everywhere; the speak English only markers; the Tagalog books masquerading as P/Filipino reading materials. There is never about us; there is never about the Kalingas reading about themselves as part of the official curriculum. We speak of Ilokano as lingua franca of the Amianan; yes, but sadly, this government has not given any support to develop it except for token grants to individuals and to groups. And all of us are paying our taxes to develop Tagalog as P/Filipino as the national language, forgetting that we ought to struggle for our languages and cultures as well because, these form part of our human rights. All of these are happening because we have been socially conditioned to speak only in the name of Tagalog as P/Filipino and in the name of English and never in the name of our own languages.

Given the condition of our multicultural life, it has become impossible to speak of a ‘national language’ that follows the model of the 1935 Constitution and played up, in all the legislations that came after, to make us believe that the only way to love this homeland is to speak the language of love in the dubious because forced, and forced because by way of legislation, it had its own money for development, it had its own army and navy to protect itself while in the meantime, all our languages are left to rot because they have lost their social prestige. Think of the communities of Dupaningan Agta mouthing phrases in Tagalog while the young Dupaningan Agtas cannot mouth a comprehensible Dupaningan Agta. Think of all Ilokano children who are too embarrassed to be heard with their Ilokano, preferring instead to speak in Tagalog, and excusing themselves, as many of the teachers, that they do not know enough Ilokano to carry a conversation or to even read. With this imposition of Tagalog=P/Filipino as the national language, we have produced illiterates in our languages and cultures; we have produced ignoramuses of our self-knowledge. What we have produced are robots and zombies mouthing the slogans of Willie Revillame or Joey de Leon or Joey Marquez. At worst, we can even mimic with much gusto, with the gyrations to boot, the slogans of the ASF Dancers of Wowowee.

The Inadequacy of Multiculturalism as a Perspective and the Need for Cultural Pluralism: Toward Linguistic Justice and Cultural Democracy

We speak of the Philippines as multilingual and multicultural. The fact is that the deliberations that happened during the 1934-1935 Constitutional Assembly, and based on the proceedings of that Assembly collected and published by Jose P. Laurel and a copy of which is kept at the Laurel Foundation Library, had an insight about our multilingual and multicultural lives—which insight is never recognized out of intellectual sloth or laziness by many of the presumed scholars of the ‘Tagalog=P/Filipino as national language’—and there was this energy to evolve a national language based on the existing native languages, an energy that could have seized the moment for all of us. But that energy was soon to be derailed, shanghaied, expended, and hijacked by a cabal of neocolonialists that took their cue from then Quezon who complained, in one of his Vigan trips, that he could not speak to the Ilokanos of Vigan except through translation. The linguistic incompetence of one man, that accidentally was the President, became one of the pillars for this linguistic injustice that are out lot today.

There are two things to look into here: (a) one thing is to say and recognize that we are multilingual and multicultural and (b) another thing is to move forward, and make as our vision the building up of a society of multicultural peoples so that this society would be imbued by the virtues and principles of cultural pluralism.

Multiculturalism is a state of affairs; cultural pluralism is a vision, is regulative ideal, and is a governing principle that we ought to pursue as it is the highest ethics of our social contract. It is only through cultural pluralism that recognizes the many that is us, the many in our ontological existences, the many that is diverse that is us that we can ever hope to right the wrongs committed against us for the last eighty years.

Conclusion: Amianan Nation in the Reality of ‘Nation among Nations’

This country—this homeland—is not simply a nation; this definition, while Constitutional, does not reflect the diversity of our languages and cultures, and the short shift that we get out of this Constitutional provision needs amending. A revisiting of our legal practices that include among others, that impotent argument of the blind and narrow –minded advocates of that unjust equation Tagalog=P/Filipino that says that the 1987 Constitution has spoken, and that in that speech, it has declared that we have a national language, and that national language is ‘Filipino’ needs to be subjected to critique. The realities tell you of an ugly and raw reality: that so many of our people have been turned into Tagalog-speaking second class citizens and have assumed the values of the center of power, and have masked themselves off with the cloak of prestige given to the Tagalog language masquerading as P/Filipino. The second class citizenship is seen in the context of that abominable film of Joey Javier Reyes (“Sakal, Sakali, Saklolo”) that permitted Gloria Diaz, an Ilokano, to mouth, “Bakit pinalaki mo ang apo ko na Bisaya?”

This country we must say is not only a nation; in reality, it is a nation among nations, and the sooner that we insist this, and the sooner that we resist that narrow concept that we are only a nation, the better for the health of all our languages and cultures.

If we imagine the country, we can speak of possible federated states here, autonomous of each other, like the United States, like many of the federal states of the world such as Belgium. Today, Spain, after many centuries of ramming down the throats of every Spaniard the kind of Madrid Spanish language it imposed on all its peoples, has acknowledge the legitimacy of at least three other languages of that country, and called it, aside from Spanish, its official languages: Andalusian for Andalusia, Catalan for the Catalan region, and Basque for the Basque region. Belgium, the exemplar of everything federalist, acknowledges four official languages and never called them ‘national’ languages. We must learn from all these, including the “English Only” campaign in the United States that has eroded the same pronouncements of that country for the fundamental respect for cultural and linguistic diversity.

There are many ills of the Philippines—and one of them that is never diagnosed, or minimally diagnosed but nevertheless is pathological and its prognosis serious, is linguistic injustice and cultural tyranny, with the power the name ourselves and our pains and our clue to our self-redemption only in the ‘national’ language. There is a pathological fear in the attempt to make a multilingual country speak a single language and we call this the ‘polylinguaphobia’, the same phobia that afflicted Quezon and company when they declared that the basis of the national language should only be a single language, the same phobia that afflicts those who advance the idea that only one and only one language is sufficient to celebrate our ‘nationhood’.

Some lessons on nation-making and state-building are learned the hard way, history tells us. This idea about the intricate connection between social justice and language rights, between language rights and human rights, between cultural pluralism and nation-building is an idea whose time has come.

It high time we start imagining an Amianan nation that addresses the issue of our being diverse and yet common in our aim to pursue the ends of social justice and linguistic justice and cultural democracy. Our name, the Amianan, is what, grounds us: we are a people of the Amian, the north wind, the northeasterly wind. It is this same wind that gives us the refreshing breeze to make us breathe in freedom and in fullness of life.

References

Agcaoili, A. S. “Resistance and Insistence in Ilokano and Amianan Languages and Cultures,” conference paper read at the 2007 International Conference on Ilokano and Amianan Languages and Cultures, Honolulu, Hawai`i, October 2007.

"By his living here among us, we knew he was not corrupt,” said a neighbor, Adela Aceron, of Crispin Beltran who died from a fall while fixing his modest house's leaking roof in anticipation of the rainy season. Inquirer, May 21, 2008

MANILA, Philippines -- Militant groups and fellow legislators are mourning the passing of the “grand old man of Philippine labor.” Anakpawis Representative Crispin Beltran, 75, died 11:48 a.m. Tuesday at the Far Eastern University-NRMF Hospital after falling from the rooftop of his Bulacan home. He left behind a wife and 11 children, plus thousands of supporters from farmer, labor, and other militant groups.“The fight of the Filipino worker goes on. The struggle continues,” Beltran’s widow, Rosario, said when she faced media around 1:30 p.m. Inquirer, May 20/08

The paper proposes perspectives and paradigms through which Ilokano and Amianan Studies could be drawn up as a mode of knowledge critically reflecting the varying experiences of the peoples of Ilocos and Northwestern Luzon, this latter place made up of various linguistic and cultural experiences but shares Ilokano as its lingua franca in public life and in governance. Arguing from the framework that a real, genuine, and liberating studies on the Philippines cannot come from a hegemonic position provided in a two-tiered way by the “Englishization” and “Tagalogization” of Philippine national and communal experience, the paper sets to put together some arguments for the urgency of Ilokano and Amianan studies as an antidote to the systemic erasures effected by a ‘centrist’ nationalism, neocolonization, and globalization. These forces have stifled the growth of creativity from the various cultures and languages of the Philippines. Four perspectives—philosophical, cultural, linguistic, and epistemological—will be used to generate the argument needed to advance the claim that studies about the Philippines cannot afford to be a totalizing political exercise in the name of the Philippine nation and Philippine nationalism without at the same time scrutinizing the linguistic, epistemic, and cultural effects of such a totalizing exercise.

Philippine Studies as a Radical Perspective

There are several ways by which we can look at Philippine Studies (PS) as a paradigm of knowledge, with the concept of paradigm here used following the Kuhnian second sense of paradigm “as shared examples” (1970: 187) or “exemplary past achievements” (1970: 175). What we have here is that even with Blumentritt’s ethnolinguistic excursus and that of Jose Rizal, we can only have some sort of “Pilipinolohiya” (“Pilipino + lohiya”) that was aimed, at best, to look at the universe of Filipinos as colonial exhibits against oppression; or colonial trophies, with the stress on the “barbarism” and “savagery” of a people as in the St. Louis Fair of 1904 in Missouri complete with villages and peoples imported from the conquered Philippine Islands 9 (cf. two “Savage Acts” and “Bontoc Eulogy”); or that idea of the search for origin, some kind of a genealogy to spite the colonizers’ aim of ‘civilizing’ us, as in the claim of Rizal that the people of the Philippines come from the Malay race (Azurin 1995: 9). Such slanted aims of Philippine Studies as a mode of knowledge, and as understood in the past, do not warrant a new model of Philippine Studies that we are trying to evolve today. With the University of the Philippines on the forefront for its conceptualization during the turbulent 60’s and 70’s and graduating many of the current scholars who can readily show the change in the cognitive frame being used in those two models of Philippine Studies, we now have a perspective of Philippine Studies that is both critical and committed—critical of the modes of producing and reproducing knowledge about the Philippines and committed as well to the production of a dynamic and continuing because always-exploratory knowledge of Philippine society, its people, its cultures, its languages, its politics, and its economic life.

The stress on the exploratory, tentative, and open-ended nature of knowledge resulting from this view of Philippine Studies is required by the admission of the interpretive nature of all human knowledge, with the recognition and admission at the same time of the mediating power of human language in all these forms of human knowledge.

For the interpretive view of human knowledge grounds itself with the urgent and expedient need to acknowledge that human knowledge, in all historical times, has always been marked by a certain historical ‘situatedness,’ by the requisites of time and place, by the requisites of actors and actions commingling and coming into a human enterprise but always understood, however tentatively, by the prevailing mode of human communication we call human language, thus, the human language that is a dialect, the language that is used in its ‘everydayness.’ Because it is the everyday language—the dialect—that speaks us, that speaks to us, that speaks with us, and to whom to do we also speak about, speak to, speak with, and speak from. Our everyday understanding of the world is thus always-already a result of, and made possible by, this everyday language—thus, in fine, there is no everyday language opening up a world to everyday knowledge that is final, complete, immutable, incorruptible, unpolluted, and pure.

All these factors, when considered with intellectual integrity, helps us realize that Philippine Studies is not about essentialism and about absolutes, but about the desire—the rugso and the derrep—to get to have both a theoretical and practical basis of understanding the world, the self, and human experiences. The ground of the revolutionary is the need and the desire to keep on renewing our understanding of the world, with the renewal mandated by surprises and terrors of change, but always measured by our ability to come to terms with the constancy of that change, always on the ready to confront it, resist it, rework it, subdue it, or accept it. To understand the evolutionary frame in which Philippine Studies has gone through for the last 150 years of so, we can speak of a heuristics here, a broad segmentation defined by the requirements of social change: (a) a pre-revolutionary, pre-liberating model and (b) a liberating model.

In 1974, the University of the Philippines approved what it called the Doctor of Philosophy in Philippine Studies, a multidisciplinary graduate program, with the principal objective of “train(ing) students who are able to look at Philippine problems from a multidisciplinary point of view in response to the need of the Philippines for scholars trained along multidisciplinary lines (Bautista 1991: 24).”

From a formal perspective, the visionary direction taken by the UP at that crucial time in the 70’s indicates the maturation of the same radical and revolutionary ideas the 60’s fermented among the ranks of those who had the courage to say that there was something wrong with the country and that something had to be done. While this concerned the country, we must understand that this new way finds its roots and connection with the earlier revolutionary struggles of our people that included, among others, the need to break the colonial ties that bounded it with the colonizer, and, with the neo-colonizers.

IAS draws its energy and élan from this same revolutionary and radical tradition. The sporadic revolts from the Ilocos is not one among and of the Ilokanos alone, this we see clearly in William Henry Scott’s Ilocano Responses to American Aggression, and in Resistance and Revolution in the Cordillera edited by Delfin Tolentino Jr. (1974) particularly Scott’s “Igorot Responses to American Aims: 1576-1986” and “Bontoc Uprising of 1881” and Fay Dumagat’s “The Role of Itneg (Tinggian) in 1896 Revolution.”

Here in these accounts and many others are historical, ideological, and liberating relationships among the various cultural communities and indigenous peoples of Amianan, who, bound by both the wind direction and by a culture they share with the earlier Y’ami/Ami/Yami peoples and enriched by Hindu, Buddhist, and Arabic culture they have come into an encounter with. Where then do we draw this concept of IAS in the context of the evolutionary developments of Philippine Studies, with its clearer and clearer direction towards knowledge that is liberating, with the idea of liberation from the very notion of what, in Ilokano, ‘wayawaya’ is all about?

The stress on the concept of wayawaya here is accidental and is traceable more to the acknowledgement of Ilokano as a lingua franca in these parts, with the idea of lingua franca tentatively removed from the colonizing intents of dominant languages. For the making of Ilokano as a lingua franca in Amianan is not a result of a legislative or an executive act, and if at all there is manipulation somewhere, these manipulations are not clearly intended but came in as a result of the exchange and diffusion of the varied ethos and languages, including the dynamic of commerce among the indigenous peoples in the Amianan.

For clearly, the Ilokanos are not better off economically from the other indigenous peoples in Amianan, with the people’s resources far more diminished than the IPs in these parts, which was why one of the main reasons fro out-migration is clearly the Ilokanos’ need to clear a new land in order to survive, coax it to fertility and then own it, and then build a semblance of the community they have left behind, by, among others, naming that new land with the name of the community they left behind, thus, a Kavintaran is not far off as a community somewhere in Nueva Viscaya.

IAS, as a tentative formula for that knowledge that is evolving among the various peoples of the Amianan, is both a composite knowledge, and as knowledge that can find its way into rightful and ethical distinction between Ilokano Studies and Amianan Studies, with the latter able to (as in the case of Cordillera Studies), and in fact, branching into other forms of area and cultural studies. It is possible therefore to imagine, and to draw up—and ethically we ought to do so--‘Isabela Studies’, ‘Cagayan Valley Studies’, ‘Ivatan Studies’, all separate from Ilokano Studies, in a tentative way, but not separable from a bigger and broader view, Amianan Studies, with Amianan Studies part and parcel of Philippine Studies view from a radical way.

The problem with Philippine Studies, so far, is it Manila-centric view of everything about the Philippines, and with the emphasis on everything Philippine in terms of the construction of nation and nationalism, which that subtext that is never acknowledged but is giving shape and form to discourses about the Philippines: the core of such a discourse has been a sensibility based on an attitude and disposition of Tagalogism. Tagalogism, as it is, is a formulation of Philippine knowledge based on the experiences of the center of politics, economics, and culture, veritably, a Manila-view, privileged and entitled by the social structures all that are basically Tagalog in framework, orientation, and world view. This whole-scale Tagalogization of the Filipino mind, with the renaming of the national language into Filipino from Pilipino—which was from Tagalog—and giving it army and a navy and all forms of mass media exposure has preempted a broad view of Philippine knowledge—or knowledge about the Philippines—that is grounded on the reality of multiculturalism and multilingualism. The systemic exclusion of other forms—and other systems of knowledge of Filipinos who do not share the Tagalog language and culture—in the public sphere has rendered these knowledge systems and forms as virtually invisible and illegitimate, and has deprived them of the prestige that they deserve. Academic scholarships that have something to do with Philippine Studies remains fundamentally either English-mediated or Tagalog=P/Filipino elaborated, for the scholars and academic and power holders, and not for the masses. The only participation of the masses in such forms of knowledge is the one that makes them a spectacle on noontime television shows, with their multitude of miseries as exhibits, and the multipliable mercies of the elites and commerce men and their allies as neocolonial remedies.

The Philosophical Roots of Ilokano and Amianan Studies

There could be two strokes by which we can attempt to understand ‘knowledge’—or those things that we need to know and that we ought to know. These two strokes—one, a knowledge of the world as physical and material, and two, the knowledge of human beings, their society, and their relationships including their relationship to their universe—ground two huge approaches to the kind of understanding that we wish to relate with IAS. Gadamer (1970) suggests the intricate connection between ‘truth’ and ‘method’, with method somehow yielding, predictably, the kind of truth that we can expect. The relevance of this view of a heuristics of human knowledge that is two-pronged, depending on which method that knowledge follows, is that we are initially freed from the anxiety created by the absolutist claim to human knowledge and its truth by a philosophical attitude that holds that only science—and science here is meant the laboratory model of science—can tell us what the truth is all about because only science can show us the way to arriving at that ‘convenient’ because certain truth at the end through that elaborate technique of repeatability and predictability innate in its method.

There is a problem in this certitude of contemporary science, as it leaves behind one aspect that it does not recognize: that even in the laying of a hypothesis—in the formulation of a ‘scientific’ problem, for example, there is already that built-in prejudice which may not be recognized as such by the one pursuing scientific knowledge. The recognition or non-recognition of the prejudice does not erase that built-in prejudice but becomes a haunting presence demanding recognition as part of the honesty and integrity of every ‘scientific’ work. The shanghaiing of contemporary science of the original notion of what science was from its epistemic roots is instructive: it tells us of the history of anxiety in the evolution of what could be deemed ‘certain’ human knowledge, what with a history of experimentation and argumentation among practicing scientists from the ancients until today. ‘Science’ coming from ‘scire’—to know—has been lost at the service of technique of repetition and prediction and precision.

The cleavage between what ‘science’ could be as drawn from the model of physics, for instance, and from that lesser form of a ‘science’ in interpreting human societies, has lasted for a long time, gradually leading to more specialized forms of human knowledge that have their own forms of language, jargon, and even tactic. One way to heal this rift—and the seeming conflict and contradiction—is suggested by Gadamer when he proposed to view two models by which we look at what knowledge is by looking at what, in fact, are we looking. When knowledge is concerned with the physical universe, or the sciences of nature, Gadamer calls this the naturwissenschaften, or studies about nature or the physical universe. On the other hand, when knowledge is concerned with the other ‘nature’—human nature—(such as those of human beings and their societies and cultures and histories) he calls this the geisteswissenschaften, or knowledge of the spirit. This formulation, while not exactly novel, as this can be traced back to the notion of knowledge as ‘science’ as formulated by the Aristotelian school of thought and elaborated by the Thomists during the medieval period with their view of the ‘branches of knowledge’ depending on their object of inquiry, suggests to us the chasm existing between the material universe as an object of inquiry and the universe of the spirit.

We can learn from this distinction—and IAS has much to draw it. The broad view for IAS is to be able to explore the ways by which knowledge can be integrated again, put back to its productive form in order to instruct the people to trust again what they have got by realizing that what they have got is as legitimate as someone else’s claim about the world and about human societies. For instance, while there is that fundamental divide between botany and the Yogad language, an understanding of the ethno-botany of the Yogad people is always-already mediated by their very own language and not someone else’s. Thus the mediated power of the languages of the Amianan peoples cannot be overlooked nor can they be underestimated. This brings us to be impossibility of holding on to the logic of accepting hook-line-and-sinker the view that the only legitimate and prestigious way to understand an experience about the Philippines is via the mediation of national language which is nothing but the equation Tagalog=P/Filipino. The naturalization of the equation Tagalog=P/Filipino via the legal process that has more dimensions for exclusion than inclusion, and has catapulted the experience of the center of power at the expense of the experience of those far from that center is one intellectual poverty Philippine Studies must be ready to recognize, admit and not deny, and remedy in an effort to relate national knowledge with social justice.

What do these things imply and how to they all relate to the issue of IAS as a body of knowledge?

Simply put: the Ilocos is not separate from the larger terrain of the Amianan, both as a physical and geographic reality and more so, as a psychological territory of diffused experiences and a long memory of cultural and economic relationship. This simply means that the broader framework for Amianan Studies includes studies about the Ilocos, about the BIBAAK peoples (a term used more as a cultural organization in Honolulu and in San Diego: Benguet, Ifugao, Bontoc, Apayao, Abra, Kalinga), and about the peoples of Amianan that out-migrated or have gone to other places and evolved their own communities in these new lands they have settled in. In the end, the IAS is not simply about a local area of studies, but an area of studies that is beyond an area itself but includes those that speak to these and about these peoples and hoping that these peoples will in turn speak to and about IAS.

To evolve an IAS whose subject matter is clear is far easier, one that can faithfully speak to and about the peoples in the Amianan. Whether to separate Ilocos/Ilokano Studies from Amianan Studies is an intellectual exercise whose relevance at this time, is moot and academic. Some speculate of a continuum by dropping the conjunction ‘and’ and putting instead what they call a continuum marker, the dash (-), but all these acts language policing, in the interest of ‘style’, are an attempt to obscure the ethical need to (a) critique the current mode of Philippine Studies and (b) invite/encourage the drawing up of other modes of studies on the Philippines by investing upon the vast possibilities of the languages and cultures of the excluded cultural groups of the country, the cultural groups that have not been served the ends of cultural and linguistic justice for a long time.

IAS and the Question of Cultural Pluralism

But to demand from the Amianan peoples the same sensitivity and sensibility does not come in conversely, as this comes with some epistemic duties based on, largely, the ability to get into metanoia—a change in consciousness—about what a liberating and critical and committed knowledge is all about.

For today, the records are coming in clearer: that so few of our peoples in Amianan have the courage to own up their cultures and languages, with the Ilokano peoples the number one of those who have the lack of wisdom to deny their Ilokanoness. The empirical data are coming in handy, and the accounting of our community activities can only come logically.

How many of the Ilokanos, for instance, have the courage to own up their language?

The answer to this is a kind of a chasm, a divide and rule thing, a consequence of the new mode of colonization all non-Tagalog peoples are going through at this time. The cyber forms of protests of this condition of exclusion are many, and the reflections of those excluded reveal how much has the national project to entitle one language at the exclusion of other languages has created so much cultural and linguistic inferiority among the people outside the center of power.

The challenge comes from the report of academics, from the ranks of public school teachers who say that their pupils and students no longer take pride in their being Ilokanos. Mabainda nga agilokano—they would be embarrassed to speak Ilokano—the teachers would say. This is a concrete report, as factual as one can get. We extend this same report to all the language and culture groups in Amianan—and we can include here the report of the migrant experiences of the peoples of Amianan abroad—and the results are fairly the same.

But real problem comes in when we ask teachers how many of them—these teachers who are making the report—have had the boldness and daring to own up their Ilokanoness.

Indeed, how many of our teachers can speak our Ilokano language with flair and elegance, the educated and formal sophistication that demands a continuous reflection of the vast possibilities of the Ilokano language? How many of our teachers can ever speak the Ilokano language with pride, and with a full acknowledgement of the terrors and surprises the Ilokano language offers?

How many, may I know, of the teachers in our ranks, of the teachers here present in this conference, can speak with pride, of the literary history of our people?

How many, may I know, of the teachers attending this conference can be seen reading Bannawag, Tawid, Saniata, Rimat, and other magazines in Ilokano without feeling insecure, ashamed, embarrassed, ‘promdi’ (from the province), ‘udong’ (a rural folk going to town)?

How many, may I know, of the academic leaders and cultural workers present in this gathering can speak with confidence and expertise, what our Ilokano writers writing in Ilokano, Tagalog, English, Spanish and many other languages are writing?

How many know Leona Florentino and her sorrows, her daring and her artistic way of owning up her own brand of feminism? How many know Ursula Villanueva? How many know Antonio Rubio? How many know Juan San Pedro Hidalgo Jr.?

How many know many of our hypervaluated writers writing not in Ilokano but in Tagalog and in English, and in a more remote past, in Spanish?

How many know of the Basi Revolt and its translation into a series of paintings, in panels, and displayed, in bad condition, at the Burgos Museum in Vigan?

How many know how our writers continue to plumb the Ilokano soul by plumbing his own soul as well? How many know of our indigenous peoples who, through their teaching and practice, have continued to make alive the traditions that are now threatened by the globalized and nationalized societies?

How many of our otherwise promising writers we are losing to other trades and industry because we do not read, because we do not take pride in the Ilokano work that we read if we ever read at all, and because we do not care whether the Ilokano and Amianan languages will ever survive and thrive in the next five years?

Many of us academics, teachers, educational leaders, cultural workers, and even government men and women are ignorant of so many things Ilokano and Amianan even if we are not supposed to be because we are supposed to be knowing better than the average man or woman on the street. History has given us this rare moral and political obligation, born of our special blessings, to become witnesses to the Ilokano and Amianan cultures and languages—to witness to its truth, to witness to its sense and meaning, to witness to its vast possibilities?

But how many among us, indeed, are taking this vocation to witness with truthfulness and courage?

How many of us can ever say with pride, that yes, I am an Ilokano scholar, and I know my European and American thinkers like Luce Irigaray and Toni Morrisson and I know my Michel Foucault and Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jurgen Habermas and Pablo Neruda and Virginia Woolf—and yet I know as well the critical works of our scholars? How many can name our writers from the Amianan, their meditations on war and conflict and struggle, and their excursus on freedom and democracy and social justice?

IAS and Multilingualism

How many have read Greg Laconsay’s translation into Ilokano the former President Ferdinand Marcos’ Today’s Revolution: Democracy, where in there, he translated into a beautiful Ilokano concept what consciousness is all about?

How many can talk of Rey Duque’s early love poems and his mature love poems, Pelagio Alcantara’s intellectual because intellectualizing poems and short stories? O, how many do we ever know at all? How many know that 100 years ago, Williams came up with a book on Ilokano grammar? How many know that there are many versions of the Christian Bble in Ilokano?

How many know that Precy Espiritu wrote not only one but two books on Ilokano grammar in the last 15 years?

These itemization of what we know and what we do not know is an attempt at accounting and soul-searching. We can easily quote some obscure author in English. We can even quote Willie Revillame from his daily inanities on his inane “Wowowie” and his making a spectacle of lady dancers who do not only know how to sway but also know how to economize on clothing and making commerce out of this daily barrage and deluge of the non-sense. But pray, tell, how many of us know something about our own revolutionary history?

Where would education begin and where would it end?

Are we to exempt our biologists here their ethical duty to not to know about our language, our people, and our culture?

Are we to exempt our educational leaders from not knowing about cultural and linguistic democracy and the cultural and linguistic genocide that is happening to our people at this time?

These issues about the Ilokanos are the same issues affecting the other 2 Ks in the Amianan: the Kordiliera and the valley of Kagayan. I am using the K-form of the sounds in the areas of the Amianan for mnemonics: the Kailokuan, the Kordiliera, and the Katantanapan (valleys) of Kagayan. This simply means that we ought to ask the same set of questions, and using the same measures, must also account the other IPs from Amianan.

But back to the issue of linguistic and cultural genocide and how it is affecting us as a people.

My clear take on this is this: that we must not allow this linguistic and cultural genocide to continue.

The message I am telegraphing is univocal and does not admit of other interpretation: we must put an end to all the forces that are making us as a mass-herd, as a people that has come to value forgetting, as a people that does valorize truth-telling but believes that there is redemption in becoming a party to all this masquerade that is happening all around us.

While in other parts of the globe, there is that humble recognition of the failure of the past, in the disturbing and deadly consequences of ‘massifying’ people and making them speak and talk and see the world only in one and only one language, and in the systemic rectification of the errors of the past by making ‘official’ the other languages from their regions that deserve no less attention than the already ‘officialized’ one by virtue of giving citizenship to this language, we are here in this country trying to make good with the fascistic possibilities of an ideology that did not and will never make our minds and imagination productive, that ideology that has something to do with a singular and only a singular language that encapsulate all what we are.

The idea of a national language is an ideal; I have always claimed this in previous works, but not at the expense of perpetrating cultural and linguistic injustice against a people of a nation made up, of various cultures and languages, virtually making this nation as a nation among nations. The idea of a national language ought to follow the spirit of the fundamental law of the land, a provision, that to me, need no further violation as we have already violated: (a) that this national language shall be called Filipino and (b) that this should be a product of all our existing languages. We need not say more on this, even with the errors of history on our side.

The big trouble comes in when in the pursuit of the single linguistic symbol, the terrorizing meaning and effect of that one word, “single,” is masked off with faux unity and faux national culture and everything faux that attend to it. There is something wrong here and scholars must do two things: (a) help in the unmasking of these lies peddled to us in the last 70 years since President Manuel Quezon signed the law that made Tagalog as the basis of the national language, with its signing what presidential power can do to make language and culture leaders accommodating to a presidential wish to have Tagalog as the national language, and (b) permit, in the spirit of linguistic justice, a form of social justice, the evolving a real, honest-to-goodness society that premised on the promise and possibilities of cultural pluralism as a way of life. The account of Gonzalez on the social drama involving the accommodation that happened among the uninformed and ignorant Ilokano and Cebuano representatives in that deliberation on the question of the basis of the national language suggest to us what presidential power can do (cf. Gonzalez 1990), and the decades-old exclusion of many Filipinos in the public sphere of national language and national culture discourse.

I take issue with Tagalog as a national language. It is unconstitutional.

I take issue with Tagalog being used as a mask to account the idea that there is now the existence of a Philippine national language that is called, among others, a schizophrenic name P/Filipino by one academic at the University of the Philippines. It is not morally right and correct.

This linguistic and cultural schizophrenia must be diagnosed, named, and unmasked—and its prognosis stated: it is making a rapid genocide of our Ilokano culture, of our Ilokano language, of the languages and cultures of Amianan.

Now, where does Ilokano and Amianan Studies come in this linguistic and cultural struggle for freedom, for autonomy, and for authenticity?

The trouble with the isomorphism—this idea that Tagalog=P/Filipino—that has happened in Tagalog as a national language is that:

(a) it has made Tagalog as a triumphal language, marching and marching with the beat of victory, and gaining advocates and adherents, and a military and a navy and ever-ready to wage a war against all of us, we who speak differently, we who see the world differently;

(b) it has positioned Tagalog as the political and cultural and economic powerhouse, with more profits for movies, magazines, schools, and other media when these are in Tagalog at the expense of the other languages, with more political power for academics and other cultural leaders who can speak Tagalog masked off as P/Filipino, with superiority claims for all other peoples who can speak it;

(c) it has made other languages inaccessible, more remote that ever, because their existence do not matter even if Tagalog advocates speak about a token attitude by including a word or two from language A, another two or three from language B, and another four or five from language C;

(d) it has made many Filipino linguists on the national language blind, preferring to wallow in the blessed thought that to maintain the isomorphism that Tagalog is equal to P/Filipino is a convenient position and a comfortable intellectual discourse;

(e) it has made Tagalog literature as the canon for anything Philippine in of poetics and the linguistically aesthetic, with Tagalog writing being used as a measure for many things, including the perks and pelf that go with Tagalog writing, and including the awarding of National Artists for Literature—practices that are not only tyrannical and undemocratic, but also anomalous in a country that acknowledges the blessings of diversity and multilingualism.

Conclusion: IAS as a Paradigm Shift

From this perspective, we see clearly the political and epistemic position of IAS. It is not going to allow knowledge that is microwavable but resists all forms of knowledge that offer convenience and comfort, but not critical enough to admit its fundamental lack of integrity and truthfulness.

It is not going to allow the repetition of lies, but will unmask these lies in an effort to forge a broader view of the universe and human experience by using a critical lens to account what makes truth and meaning matters.

In the end, we will speak here of an IAS that looks at the universe of the peoples of Amianan from a political, cultural, and economic perspective:

(a) a federated part of the country with full autonomy, with its lingua franca, with its politics that is grounded on a caring concern for the power of the people to define their own destinies in their own terms;

(b) an Amianan made up of diverse cultures and peoples and languages, but unifies, in a certain way, by a lingua franca enriched by the languages of the various IPs; and

(c) an Amianan that becomes its own hub of investment and commerce, and that has the capability to trade, as in the past, with other nation-states, other federated communities of the Philippines, and among its IPs.

IAS is a whole new epistemology, a new vision, a new way of looking at things.

IAS is a door to liberation, to social redemption, to cultural affirmation of what are the people’s cultural and linguistic rights.